UPDATE: An alert reader has informed me that the Edge site also contains a “debate” (well, really more of a conversation) between Angier and David Sloan Wilson, which you can find here. Wilson doesn’t seem to care whether religion is true or false, maintaining that the only thing a scientist should care about is whether […]
A person named Don Flood conributes this bit of apologetics to one of my posts, “Catholics claim that lies are truer than truth“, which dealt with the inability to comport the results of genetics with the fiction that Adam and Eve were the literal ancestors of all humanity. Here goes (I’ve broken the comment into […]
The Topeka (Kansas) Capitol-Journal’s online site, cjonline.com, has a religion column called Genesis Station, written by Floyd Lee. Today’s column, “So how would you respond to this atheist?” takes up a question raised in an essay by preacher-turned atheist Mike Aus, and which I discussed on this site. Lee says this (emphasis is his): Aus […]
About a dozen readers have sent me this item, I suppose because they wanted my response. I’ve sat on my hands about this, as it involves the physicist Sean Carroll, whom I consider a friend, a really nice guy, and someone who has always provided prompt and thorough replies when I’ve plied him with many […]
Yesterday’s New York Times reports on the arrival of a new science magazine: Nautilus: Science Connected. The NYT piece,”A glossy science magazine or a living fossil?“, notes that the magazine is funded by the Templeton Foundation (in fact, there’s no mention of any other funding), will appear quarterly on paper for a fee of $49/year, […]
Four days ago I posted on Gary Marcus’s nice piece in the New Yorker, “Can science lead to faith?“, decrying the new brand of natural theology that purports to find evidence for God, the divine, or the numinous in the natural world. An alert reader has called my attention to a column that Robert Mankoff, […]
“Natural theology” is the discipline that attempts to find evidence for God in the natural world. The most famous example of this doomed exercise is, of course, the erstwhile use of animal and plant “design” as evidence for God’s beneficence. But Darwin dispelled that in 1859. Earlier, Newton cited the regular and stable orbits of […]
The devout accommodationist Keith Kloor has struck again (you’ll find three posts about him on this site if you search for “Kloor”). I am apparently an Islamophobe for saying that Islam was behind the Boston bombing. Actually, I didn’t say that Islam was behind the bombings—Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the bombers, did! I’ll put up Kloor’s […]
Last August I wrote (critically, of course) about a $5 million grant given to the University of California at Riverside by the Templeton Foundation. The subject was “Immortality,” and the lucky recipient was philosophy professor John Fischer. If you read my earlier post on this, you’ll know that much of the Templeton money was earmarked […]
Poor Andrew Brown! He got left behind in the salvo of “Islamophobia” accusations leveled by his fellow journalists against the New Atheists. To make up for it, he has an especially nasty post in today’s Guardian, with the headling “Richard Dawkins’ latest anti-Muslim Twitter spat lays bare his hypocrisy” (Subtitle: “The celebrity atheist’s Twitter rant […]
